stderr Redirection

Order Matters In STDERR redirection

So the typical problem is that a cron job is leaking stderr output into mail even though there is a perfectly good looking 2>&1 in the command line.

However, the order you put things on the command line matters.

So this will redirect stderr to stdout and then stdout into a file:

command >> $FILE 2>&1

...but this won't:

command 2>&1 >> $FILE

I was usually using the second format in my crontab entries because it makes logical sense. However it doesn't do what you expect it to do.